The worlds' first computational psychiatry centre has opened in London with a mission to shine a new light on human cognition and understand how it becomes disrupted in disorders such as depression and dementia.

Backed by a five-year €5m (£4.1m) investment from the Max Planck Society and UCL, the centre, which is named after its funders and will be based in London and Berlin, will use powerful modern technology in an effort to create more detailed models than ever before of how the human brain works.

Professor Ray Dolan, academic co-leader of the centre, said: "The brain is at some level an information processing machine and we have to understand what it's doing and how that information processor is working. We are trying to understand normal cognition with respect to the type of processes that go awry in psychiatric disorders and in ageing, we then intend to apply these models to understand ageing, depression or any other psychiatric disorders where we think the models may be appropriate. "

The Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research centre, which opened on Tuesday, aims to use computational models to bridge the gap between neuroscience and the phenomena seen in psychiatric disorders.

Ulman Lindenberger, director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, said: "If you have a whole, functioning, normal model of how decision-making or emotional responses work in the normal functioning brain, you can look at what are the early indicators in the brain [in disorders] and even try to stop them."

One such disorder is dementia, which, with people living longer in most countries, has been described as one of the biggest global public health challenges facing this generation.

One of the priorities is to move from simply describing psychiatric disorders to understanding how they develop. The scientists hope that this will yield benefits in the same way that with cancer, understanding how different processes give rise to the disease has opened up new personalised treatment strategies.

They also hope that the greater understanding granted by the models may enable them to identify drugs already in existence that could be used to treat people with specific versions of a disorder. "A lot of major pharmaceutical companies have dropped their research into CNS [central nervous system disorders] as they have not made progress in it," said Dolan. "There is a 15 to 20 years lag for payback. It may be that some of the companies' drugs would have already been through the regulatory process but we just need to use them in a specific way."

He said that there may also be progress in a more controversial field, noting that while there is recognition that becoming less physically capable is an unavoidable part of ageing there is not the same recognition that mental capability will also deteriorate, save in the case of dementia. He said that by understanding this reduction in mental capability, there could possibly be drugs to treat it, although there are ethical issues around such intervention. "Who at the age of 75 would not like to think like people at the age of 30?" he said.